Re: hard drive problem

Brad wrote:

Yes, there could be malware (virus or other), not just fragments, but
entire malware files. But it doesn't matter at all. They can't run
from there and there can be *no* danger from *anything* in those
spaces.

But if a program had access to the IDE disk interface it could force
reads from specific addresses, which as I vaguely recall uses some
logical block addressing, independent of any file system.


A malware program would have no idea where to look for such fragments.
Besides, any such fragments would quickly be overwritten. And if you had a
malware program that could find such fragments, it wouldn't need to, since
it could far more easily incorporate that code within itself.


so no file system could run any code in those spaces, but I can force
a disk to seek at any LBA address I can dream up and read whats
there, so it seems to me in a lightly sustainable paranoia that some
program could generate seeks in certain locations, if it was always
every nth offset?


In this case, I think "paranoia" is the right word. You are worrying about
something that just doesn't exist in the real world. But if you want to
zero-fill your drive, as I said earlier, go ahead--it won't hurt you. But it
*is* a waste of time and effort if you are reformatting and reinstalling
Windows.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup


.

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